kyuuketsukirui: I...what? Hi! I just want to write and read about queer characters. I don't want a fucking afterschool special.

kattahj: taking my slash off the gay turf If people want to write their characters as being gay as in belonging to a gay subculture, great. But it doesn't have jack shit to do with the quality of the fic or the authenticy of the characters' emotions.

eska_rina: Is slash gay? Well, what IS gay? Fact: the meaning of words can change. Today "slash" can mean a lot more than "OMG, we don't have any female characters – let's ship two male characters"! [poll]

alchemia: 'There's a kind of gaydar that lets you spot them' There's been an awful lot of posts recently on the meaning of words in fandom, especially on what the word 'slash' really means (and what is 'gay' and 'queer' and 'gen' etc etc)....Most people don't know, or do not care, about those details. They will use the words as they want to, and by using them, they are the ones who are ultimately defining and giving meaning to the words in a way that any rant to the contrary never can.

executrix: I Wreck the Curve (But Fail to Capture the Castle) I've decided that, really, it all comes down to the unspoken because un-thought-through assumption on the part of many people that Straight, Non-Poor, White Men are the definition of normality, and everyone else is abnormal. Paradoxically, though, those who fall within the Normal range are allowed to be seen as individuals, whereas others are The Image of Women or African-Americans or The Underclass.

affinity8: Wondering I wonder why women writers who call themselves feminists persist in writing from the male POV. This is not an indictment, nor an accusation, nor a reflection on the manuscripts I've been reading, nor a statistical survey of author and POV genders in F & SF, Realms, etc. I'm simple curious. Why do feminists write from the male POV?

commodorified: When my brane gets going it's a bit like living inside an engine room... "Feminists are almost as likely as any other group to write more about men/write male POV than women/female POV. That's interesting. What's that about?" And, okay, that IS interesting. I don't think it's BAD, but it's INTERESTING.

ajhalluk: I was just in the middle of affinity8's essay was an important essay. It was, in my view, a massively wrong-headed essay; it tended to deprive women of their own voices in favour of their Offically Allocated One True Voice, and I thought it was deeply pernicious for doing so.

skuf: Argumentative: slashers vs. het-shippers So, after faffing about with het fics for a few weeks, I'm noticing a difference between slashers and het-shippers (hetters? What's them called?).

ladysorka: [slash and het] In a thread in this post, cathexys argued that slash fen were involved in fandom as a whole than het fen, and that het fen aren't likely to stick around without a key fannish love, or to go "shopping around" for new fandoms, and that... really, really made me blink....It's not about the slash for me. It's not about the het. It's about the 'ship*.

commodorified: Guest Speaker Day, woo-hoo! I live in a universe where men mostly get together when their girlfriends get tired of watching them dither and heave them at each other's heads....And I more or less understand how WOMEN pick each other up in homosocial environments ... But this all leaves me faintly at a loss when it comes to trying to imagine how men manage these matters on their own.

lunacy: [comraderie to romance: the dos and don'ts] I've always been a little too obsessed with the comrades-to-lovers scenario (especially in queer romance but it's really any), I feel, but it's for good reason: if you're a fantasy/adventure-plot reader and you like your romance liberally sprinkled at best, you're often naturally blessed with an abundance of comrade-type friendships.

carolyn_claire: Um, hi. Is fandom, as a whole, more self-conscious, now, more about image, more snobbish, even, than it has been in the past? I know I've experienced a 'taste evolution' of my own over the decade I've been doing this; the stories I'd once have wallowed in I now eye askance--that's cliched/predictable/fanoned to death! She's taken the angst totally OT!... I also wonder, aside from the personal evolution of the reader/writer, has fandom itself evolved in its tastes?

elanorgardner: EG's Meanderings To me, writing fanfiction is like love and marriage, or, if you are stuck in the U.S. and can't marry your beloved, let's say committed relationship.

thelastgoodname: On correspondence and other related things How does the option for anonymity affect one's fandom interactions?...How does the option for privacy affect one's fandom interactions?

profshallowness: Some things I've learnt about points of view I collect links for reading 'later', and because I come by a whole lot of links, and meta discussions are cyclical, I tend to group them. The list of links related to POV has been growing and growing for a while, because POV is a topic I don't choose to think about much as a writer or reader, and, at root, it's a subject on which I sort of didn't want to read other people telling me I was being wrong.

gwyn_r: Size matters... or maybe not I've been surrounded by conversations about aspect ratios a lot lately, having just finished a Firefly vid that uses both series and movie clips to equal degree and because the subject was raised as a potential topic at Vividcon this year. In the past year or so, I've sweated over aspect ratios to an annoying degree, especially when working on movie vids. But the funny thing is, almost no one I know ever notices different aspect ratios in the vids, even when the differences are quite dramatic... [poll]